Samuel spent most of his school years in Elkhart County, Indiana, where his family had moved in 1879. He graduated from the Elkhart High School in 1890, one of the first Mennonite high school graduates in the Middle West. He attended the Moody Bible Institute 1894-1895 and for six months in 1897-1898. From 1890-1894 he worked for the Mennonite Publishing Company in Elkhart. He was converted at meetings held in Elkhart by his father and was baptized on 26 May 1888. He was elected superintendent of the Elkhart Mennonite Sunday school on 28 December 1893. In 1894-1895 he served in the Mennonite Home Mission in Chicago. Here he was ordained to the ministry on 21 April 1895, by John F. Funk of Elkhart; he was ordained bishop in Vineland, Ontario, on 26 September 1903.

He served as pastor of the Moyer congregation in Vineland from 1902 until he died in 1954, and as bishop of the Niagara District from 1903. He was a charter member of the Nonresistant Relief Organization in Ontario, organized in 1918, and its secretary 1920-1950. In 1918 he was appointed the special correspondent with the Canadian government regarding military service and the immigration of the Russian Mennonites. He was associated with the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization 1922-1944 and actively aided the immigration from Russia to Ontario 1922-1925. In his earlier ministry he was widely used in Bible conference and evangelistic work. In 1901 on a commission from the Ontario Conference he organized a number of congregations and ordained ministers and deacons in Alberta. He died in Vineland on 28 June 1954. He was one of the outstanding figures of the Mennonite Church (MC) throughout his more than half-century of service in the ministry, and made an extraordinary and lasting contribution to it, always a man of vision, constructive and peace-loving, widely beloved and highly regarded.